discernment and delight

being there: Daniel 1-2

Before the book of Daniel even gets to the Babylonian king’s weird dream and self-destructive behavior with his would-be advisors, a remarkable scenario is unfolded before the reader: the faithful Jew in the court of the foreign king.

Daniel and his friends represent the cream of young Jewish deportees. They are scholar-athletes, Judah’s finest, their Yahwistic names formally stripped of them so that Babylon’s gods might be invoked each time someone calls out to them in the foreign-syllabled names Belteshazzar, Shadrak, Meshak, and Abed-Nego. The situation promises little, and much.

The environment is clearly inhospitable to Jewish faith. Shot through with the all-pervading religion of Babylon, subject to the whim of a pagan sovereign, obsessed with beauty of body and mind, nourished by the language and literature of the oppressor. What could can come of such a thing when young men are in the mix?

Yet the four Judahite men excel, even in what the text duly abbreviates but still recognizes as ‘the language and literature of Babylon’. With their souls still pointed in the direction of smoking Jerusalem, their minds and tongues have developed due fluency in the intellectual world of the conquering empire.

Astonishingly, they are present when called upon, or at least Daniel is so.

His career might have gone unremarked, indeed there must have been many Daniels as versed and postured as this one for service whom history overlooked in its unlikely preservation of the Jews, who simply will not disappear as they might have been supposed to do. No script seems capable of airbrushing them out of the larger picture, no editor potent to achieve their disappearance. They are a most stubborn fact on the ground, surviving potencies and powers against all odds as though protected by some invisible hand. And Daniel, who is there. Fluent, self-deprecating, a prayerful young man, deferential and discrete in all his dealings.

One might wonder of his own historical moment: Where are the Daniels? In whose court do they serve, what language have they mastered, what discretion refined?